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Edmondo Crimi purchased his first vampire-killing kit in 1977.
The 18-year-old from Brooklyn had cut his teeth in the antique business on the streets of New York, and he was exploring the famous Marché aux Puces de Saint-Ouen flea market on the outskirts of Paris.
There he came across a box with an axe, swords, holy water, garlic, a Bible and a gun.
He knew what it was because he grew up hearing stories about vampire-killing kits and other aspects of the paranormal from his family, Crimi said. Two of his great-uncles, after all, were exorcists in their hometown of Catania, Sicily.
He nearly emptied his savings and forked over $600 for the piece, which he took back to his hotel and slept with in his bed.
“I was afraid that someone would break in and steal it,” Crimi said. “And also, I was getting nervous. Are there vampires, really? Am I gonna need this piece?”
Crimi somehow got the case of deadly wares on a plane. When he reached the United States, customs agents took him into a room and interrogated him about the mysterious artifact.
“What is this? Why do you have it?” the agents asked him, to which he responded that it was a vampire-killing set, and he was planning to start collecting them.
“Then they asked me, ‘Are you a vampire?’ I said, ‘Well, why would I have a vampire-killing set if I was a vampire?’” Crimi said.
At that point, they thought he “was a lunatic,” but the agents were also fascinated by the relic of a bygone era, he recalled. They even took Polaroid photos to show their kids.
That kit is now one of hundreds of artifacts and antiques described in Crimi’s new book, “Vault of the Vampire,” which he said serves as a “catalogue raisonné,” or annotated list of items on display at his Vampire and Paranormal Museum in Doylestown.
Entries of vampire-related objects, artwork featuring the Stoics’ “Memento Mori” motif, folkloric works and more that Crimi has collected over the past 40 years are displayed in glossy photos, along with detailed historical research about the artifacts and the context of where and how they were made.
“Because we are a museum, we always bring things in and out,” Crimi said. “We get items from other people sometimes that want to loan it to the museum.”
Crimi’s assistant, Cammi Cohen, contributed to deciphering handwritten notes and combing through records to assemble descriptions of pieces featured in the book.
Available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble and in the gift shop at VAMPA Museum, “Vault of the Vampire” also incorporates stories from Crimi’s youth, growing up in a Roman Catholic, Italian American family in Brooklyn.
“I don’t believe in vampires in the Dracula sense,” Crimi said. “That’s fiction. It’s more about a paranormal, supernatural concept. And we would just sit around eating pasta, eating Italian food, and talking about all these stories and things that a lot of my family members thought they saw … I think a lot of it was true. I think some of it was imaginative.”
Some of those childhood anecdotes make for an unexpectedly amusing read, Crimi said.
“A book on vampires is actually very funny,” he said.
